No Stupid Questions

what do you really need to be up to date with these days? you're gonna find out about really major changes anyways, just focus on the local things that you have even the slightest chance of maybe potentially slightly influencing.

shit's fucked, shit sucks, we all know that, we don't need to constantly remind ourselves that shit's fucked, instead just do whatever you can to make the world a better place. And that starts with making sure you're as mentally healthy as possible, which does not include making yourself feel awful.

The news is primarily billionaire propaganda. It does not add value to your life. When it’s important you’ll hear about it, and then you can read up. You don’t have to be the first to know. Nothing bad will happen to you for being less informed.

I block most news sources and get the jist of events via memes.

Are those who are well adjusted to a unjust world really the sane ones?

I ignore the news, because I'm probably dying withing a few years, so I'm just chillin' and enjoying whatever's left.

Don't need to make depression worse, I'm not a politician, I can't change anything.

I'm not a cis white dude (I'm Chinese-American), its not my fight. Like what am I supposed to do? Protest, get a lot of attention from the government, and then get labeled a "CCP Spy" get set to some gulag. Then they'll raid Chinatown and pillage everything. Then some of the first-gen inmigrants are gonna go on wechat and blame me for "stirring the pot". I mean, can you imagine if Thomas Matthew Crooks was a gay black guy? It would've been so much worse. So much scapegoating. If I do anything, they'll just scapegoat everyone that looks like me.

So good luck y'all, my health is deteriorating, don't have the brain energy to take action, and I've already accepted death, literally hurts my brain to think.

I've figured that I can either be informed or happy. Not both.

This is crazy, but i read the news on paper. I have a couple of subscriptions to magazines with good reporting, but you could also hit up your library to read for free. For one thing, print journalism is a lot more in-depth and balanced than the outrage-mill crap i find online.

On Lemmy i read headlines only in case something happens that i stay current, but i rarely read a whole article. This contains my news consumption to a small portion of my day.

Plus, Trump says 64 stupid lthings a week. I read all 64 in 1 hour each week and get it over with, instead of poisoning myself with it several times a day.

I try to read an equal amount of theory and history as I do news. Context is everything. When you read about these bastards doing evil deeds, read too about Mussolini hanging from a bridge. I enjoy learning about coups perpetrated by the CIA last century (there’s 70 of them) and all the horrendous fallout it caused so that I can taunt nationalists with facts about the nature of the empire that they’re only just now recognizing.

News is only a part of the process. Theory, praxis, cadre, in equal parts.

That’s the neat part. I don’t. I’m depressed as fuck.

You don’t.

I read news once a week and this is it

I block news from all social media. Then I chose 2 news networks I thought had decent reporting and wasn't too bias. Every morning I read news from the 2 sources and that is ALL the news I consume for that day. That's it.

If this is too overwhelming even you can try starting with 1 news source. I find that news is mostly still pretty boring (in a good way) if you only look at 1 source.

I have a large broken chest freezer I climb into, I shut the lid and scream

I remind myself that news media have a vested interest in keeping me outraged and on the edge of my seat, addicted to consuming their every update.

There are definitely things worth getting outraged over. But on top of that we have an outrage industry harvesting our attention and fear for ad dollars.

So I remind myself not to spiral down the doomclick drain. If something is THAT important I’m going to hear about it. I don’t need to be checking a news app daily.

On top of this I do what I can to support change. We donate to Ukraine and Gaza relief efforts. We vote. We make our political views known to those around us to support right action in them as well (not talking about politics is what Trumpers want - they want cover for their fascist hate and violence - I make damn sure that everyone I know is aware that there’s no room for that shit in my life).

Conserve your strength. Do everything material that you can, and don’t spend yourself past that point.

But that first part is important: DO EVERYTHING YOU CAN.

Insert Invincible 'you don't' meme here

But seriously, you can't. You either choose to be ignorant of 99.99% of the world or to be ignorant of 99.9% of the world and live in a perpetual scramble to absorb all the disparate information. Most news isn't worth knowing in and of itself, only serving as data to construct deeper understanding, so unless you are going to actually connect the dots, it's a better use of your time to let the world act as a filter and only pay attention to what hangs around long enough to get through to you.

This too shall pass. I take comfort that the pendulum of politics has always swung back and forth. This moment of insanity should swing back to rebuilding, and progressive changes.

When I was in college, we had “the midnight scream”. During finals, entire dorms would open their windows at midnight and just scream. It was very effective at venting frustration, allowing us all to refocus on studying. Perhaps that’s what’s happening now: we’re all just screaming in frustration.

This is exactly the problem and how we got into this mess in the first place. When we read terrible things are happening, instead of getting mad and doing something we choose to ignore it and pretend it's not happening. That allows the terrible people to keep doing whatever they want.

Sure, it's easier to ignore it now for your mental health, but when things get even worse, you'll be worse off too. It's worth some stress and pain now to prevent even more in the future.

If you don't like what you read in the news, organize and take action. Don't bury your head in the sand. It won't get better on its own.

I find old Stoic philosophy helpful. If I can't do anything about it, I stay informed but try to be mindful of my limitations. If I can do anything about it, even if not much, if I'm worried about the thing I use that to do what I can.

Step 1: remove all news feeds from your life.

Step 2: live your life. Be happy. Have fun.

Step 3: if anything worth knowing actually happens, it will filter in through your social networks.

Nihilism. Everything is terrible and there's nothing you can do about it. Take care of yourself, enjoy what you can while you still can and don't have kids.

You do something, anything, about the shit you disagree with. Usa stops famine support? Fuck you, Unicef is not going to die on my watch. Etc.

50% is recycling old garbage, 30% is things that don’t affect you in any way, 15% is nice to know but it wouldn’t change your life if you didn’t know, 3% is actually newsworthy and affects you, rest is weather.

My news comes mainly from Lemmy, Wikipedia, sometimes Wikinews, maybe other people, and short daily podcasts. The fun radio podcasts are currently on break (though they're less 'news', more current topics made funny), but I sometimes also listen to a short daily news podcast.

Lemmy is by far the worst source, because 'Murican-centrism. So much US spam. If I could easily filter out the US off Lemmy, I'd do it in a jiffy. I'd even be willing to cut off English entirely. Or leave Lemmy, touch grass. The latter seems to be the most likely option, from what I know of Lemmy.

With Wikipedia, and Wikinews, I append a relevant language code to the url, like xx.wikipedia.org, and get stuff in my language, less 'Murican. I sometimes do that in other languages I know (including English).

Podcasts are relevant by location and/or language, depending on the podcast (they sometimes bring up US stuff, but that's far less annoying than Lemmy's spam, and sometimes actually relevant (for the news one, at least))

Alcohol

For me it's just the knowledge that I have around 100 total years on this planet and a limited amount of reach in terms of geography, relationships, etc.

I can't swing an election by myself, but with me and millions of my closest friends we can. But only if we all pull together. It's like a paradox but not quite.

That's my secret Cap.

I've always been insane! 🤪

I realised long ago that the human brain is not capable of handling everything that's happening all around the world, all the time. I'm selective about what media I consume and I make extensive use of blocklists for things that aren't my fight.

Scan headlines but only read what affects me. These days we hear about all the awful things that happen around the word but our ability to do something about them is still the same as a hundred years ago

I gloat at the odd Epstein article but I don't read everything. I don't need to know all that. If you want to keep your sanity in times like these you gotta live in the moment. Enjoy every little thing like it's the first time you're experiencing it. Keep your worries to what you can control. And don't try to control things you can't. It's actually easier to learn this while times are tough.

I listen to one weekly news podcast (Lage der Nation), that focuses on the most important topics for where I live, which includes big international events.

Getting an update on the relevant happenings once a week, feels way healthier than reading what's going horribly wrong somewhere multiple times a day.

I had to unfollow and unsubscribe a bit on mastodon and Lemmy to reduce the amount of news I see there, but now it's tolerable.

However, I still have to take breaks, when I feel my mental health isn't up for it.

I don't consume a lot of content from mainstream news sites, and that helps. Those agencies, like major social media sites, are designed to piss you off and keep your eyes glued to ads.

Most of my news exposure is through Lemmy or Mastodon, through which I can automate the curation of my feed and I don't see things that are going to rile me up as much; and therefore, I only see things that might rile me up when it's my intention to do so.

There's a lot of it you can just tune out

Not because it doesn't matter, but because it's not actually new.

"oh Israel is still doing its genocide. Yeah, they would, no one is bothering to stop them. Don't give me details. Let me know if something CHANGES"

The "news" cycle has a way of always finding further details on what is actually very old information, and those details serve you, the reader, no purpose other than creating emotional distress.

I’m not sure you can. I think boundary setting is important and also contributing to causes you care about. It’s the difference between things you can control and things you can’t, and letting go of the things you can’t control.

A ridiculous amount of copeing mechanisms and my supportive close family and friends where we keep eachother sane. Growing up in all this bullshit, you get used tovit somewhat.

For me, it's getting my news via memes/Lemmy. It's like filtering water through sand. Much less dirt and grime.

Get into taking news slowly. Maybe set one day in the week for you to catch up on what happened a bit. And resist the urge to go checking for news constantly. Getting news from social media make it seem like a lot is going on all the time, but its mostly a lot of noise and many rehashings of the same "news" (especially if you get them through memes in social networks). Getting news on sunday is cool because you let matters cool down a bit and people have had the time to express what has happened better (theres less journalism on the weekends I guess).

I just don't really read the news. Might listen to a bulletin here or there on the radio.

I remove almost everything that is considered breaking current events. Someone is going to do something stupid to someone else. Disasters are going to happen. Wars are being fought (IMHO WW3 had already begun and everyone is trying to stay out of it like the US did in WW2) just that everyone is avoiding it. I have watched a local to me longlines station have a lot of new activity and a person is living there in a travel trailer but two years ago it was basically defunct. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QfHyy-4W5X0 is an example of a different one but gives an idea of the use.

All this crap happens and there is nothing I can do about it nor does it help my daily life. I get a little bit of local news directly from their site and everything else is related to tech or science. I also block Javascript on the browser I use for news feeds, it prevents headlines from other crap being shoved into articles I choose to read on many sites and if breaks a site I just remove it from my feed.

I'm also doing a lot of repairs on a 100 year old house while I live in it, trying to work towards teaching people who have dealt with childhood trauma and others with PTSD how to SCUBA dive for free, and doing my best to stay sane with everything that has happened in my life.

news - disinformation bureau. might read headlines. can't watch national news with daily disasters

Don't watch mainstream media and get some of your news from independent sources, like Ken Klippenstein. I get most of my news from AP News and then from the Politics section in Lemmy.